


Flying Too Close To The Sun

by UniverseOnHerShoulders



Series: Series 12 Vignettes [2]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gallifrey, Post-Episode: s12e05 Fugitive of the Judoon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-08
Updated: 2020-02-08
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:28:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22528606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UniverseOnHerShoulders/pseuds/UniverseOnHerShoulders
Summary: "Where do you go?""Home. On my own."On Gallifrey, the Doctor strives to understand, and strives to remember.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor/The Master (Dhawan)
Series: Series 12 Vignettes [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1731406
Comments: 10
Kudos: 102





	Flying Too Close To The Sun

**Author's Note:**

> Basically a bucketload of angst inspired by Yaz's question to the Doctor at the beginning of _Fugitive of the Judoon_ and the Doctor's revelation that she goes home, to stare at everything the Master has done.

The Doctor would like to say she doesn’t make a habit of this.

She’d be lying.

She’d like to say that this is the first time, and it’ll be the last.

She’d be lying.

She’d like to say she doesn’t cry as she does it.

She’d be lying.

She sits, as she so often does these days, on a boulder facing out on what had, until fairly recently, been the Citadel. It’s a familiar spot now, and she takes up her usual position, legs crossed, one elbow propped on right knee with her head balanced atop that hand, as her left hand fiddles with the scanner that has become her perennial companion in the hours and minutes not filled by her found family back on Earth, or exploring some distant locale. When she can, she arranges herself into this pretzel-like shape, and then fixes her gaze out over the smoking remains of her planet, allowing the horror of it all to sink in as she half-listens to the chatter emanating from the scanner as it does its job.

Despite her loathing for Gallifrey that has developed in the centuries and millennia since she’d left, she can’t help but feel pangs of nostalgia for it now, as she looks out over the ruins; pangs of longing and yearning that only obliteration could possibly bring, as the Time Lords, free from the trappings of their own duplicity and malevolence, assume a mythical status in her mind, their memory no longer tainted by their own hatred and passion for warmongering. While a trace of their darker selves remains, she tries to render her memories positive; tries to place her people as a race that did more good than ill. It is a foolish, naïve attempt at erasing a narrative that doesn’t fit with the mythological status she wants to convey upon them, but she must do her best, determined not to allow their memory to slip into oblivion, and so she doesn’t recall the Time War; doesn’t recall the hatred; doesn’t recall their treatment of others.

Instead, she remembers her youth, carefree and innocent as she had run and played at the Academy with her oldest friend, and she can still picture the exasperated faces of her teachers as they had striven to instil in her a respect for the old ways; an understanding of Time Lord traditions; an appreciation for the history and culture and science of the universe. She’d never been particularly studious, even then, although the subjects themselves had fascinated her, and so outside of her lessons she had run amok with the Master – both of them as-yet unchristened; unburdened by their titles and all they conveyed – and they had learnt for themselves in a manner that was far more interesting than the stuffy, textbook-heavy methods of their instructors. She can still remember the devices and gadgets they’d built; the fireside storytelling at the Shobogan villages; the wanderings amongst the Crypts, learning from the ghosts of the past. She can still remember, despite her best endeavours to forget, being beaten for her insolence; being caught in places she was not supposed to be; being punished for the crime of refusing to conform. And beside her, through it all, had been the guiding light that had been Koschei; a boy, nothing more, nothing less; and her dearest friend.

The scanner clicks and beeps, indicating its continuing inability to locate the one person she needs most in the universe, but she tunes it out as she allows her mind to drift, and remembers their initiation ceremony; the raw nature of the Untempered Schism as she’d stared deep into its purple-hued abyss and felt the might and power of it as it roared back at her. She remembered passing Koschei as she’d been led away and he’d been led towards it; remembered the sudden feeling of status that had been conferred upon her by the important rite of passage. She’d looked at him then with something approaching contempt; something which until that moment she had disavowed; and for the first time, that day she had understood what it meant to be a Time Lord. That day, for the first time, she had allowed herself to feel superior to others, until the intoxicating rush of it had frightened her, and she’d vowed to never let herself be carried away in the same way again.

It hadn’t been until later that she’d understood what they’d done to her best friend; why he was no longer the same inquisitive, compassionate youth that she’d spent her first few centuries alongside. When she’d discovered what they’d inflicted upon him – later; much later; too much later to do any good – she’d raged and she’d screamed; she’d allowed the loathing of her people that she’d fought to repress to instead consume her as she’d realised that the Time Lords had looked at a child and seen only a weapon; looked at a boy and seen only their own egotistical self-interest. A life ruined by insanity, and for what? The salvation of the people who had done it to him; the salvation of a people so genocidal and megalomaniacal that even she, one of them, had been secretly glad to watch their civilisation fall and their power wane as the Time War had raged on.

She shudders as she remembers how it had felt the first time she’d believed Gallifrey to have fallen; the first time that she had seen its destruction. Alongside her bitter, vengeful sense of relief, there had been the realisation that this was it now – she was the last of the Time Lords. Alone in the universe, bearing the legacy of a people she had fought for, yes, but the legacy of a people who she had come to despise for their selfishness and pomposity; their wilful ignorance and their hatred; their contempt for all races other than their own. The rest of the universe were nothing more than tools or means to an end, and she’d despised them for it; despised them for the fact that for all their preaching about expanding horizons and pioneering ideologies, they still failed to see the value of others.

She’d wanted to mourn them, and she had; mourned all that they’d stood for once – knowledge and innovation and benevolence; goodness and invention and education – but each moment of grief had been tarnished by the inverse of the joy that recalling Gallifrey brought her; the war, the bitterness, and the fury of the Time Lords. The fire and blood she had fought in; the weapons they had handed her, increasingly destructive, increasingly dangerous, increasingly unstable; the orders they’d barked without any care for those who would die in the name of Gallifrey. The death and the carnage that the Time War had brought, alongside the simple unwriting of the history she’d thought she’d known, as people she’d fought alongside had simply winked out of existence.

She’d carried Gallifrey with her, though. Carried the Time Lords with her as she’d rebuilt her life, attempting to recall only her happiness; only her joy. She’d struggled each day to remember the face of her first wife, and her second; remember the names of each of her children and the way they had felt in her arms as they slumbered after days spent in the sun or at the Academy. She’d loved them each with the same ardent, desperate fervour that possesses new parents; loved them each with the same ferocity and intensity and the knowledge that if anyone or anything had come for them, she would have surrendered her life and her regenerations to keep them safe.

She still remembers how they’d screamed as they’d been slaughtered. Still remembers clinging to the lifeless bodies of her children, shaking them fruitlessly, as though they’d merely been sleeping on the orange embers of what had once been their home. Still remembers the weight of them in her arms as she’d carried them to the grave that she’d dug, effortfully and laboriously by hand, in the lee of the hill that had once formed the highest point of their homestead, and laid them in the ground as she had once laid them in bed. Her wives, eyes closed, with the children arranged between them. Shovelling soil onto them had felt like sacrilege, but the thought of the Daleks laying eyes on their corpses somehow seemed worse; a kind of desecration of the highest order. They had taken her family from her, and they would not have the privilege of looking upon them again. Her loved ones would be safe below the ground, until she could reclaim them and give them the traditional cremation that was the custom of her people.

Days later, Gallifrey had burned.

A funeral pyre for an entire race.

It hadn’t seemed enough.

She thinks about it now. Even with the planet reduced to rubble and ashes, she could still have guided you home; could have done so with her eyes closed and her ears plugged. Sometimes, as she sits on her rock and stares out at the ruins, she still thinks about going back to the homestead and finding her family’s last resting place; thinks about taking some small stone or handful of earth to carry with her in the TARDIS; a physical representation of the memories she takes with her wherever she goes. Something about the idea, however, is anathema to her; the thought makes her feel physically sick, as she had when she’d found the ash and dust from her shoes tracked across the console room floor. It had been as though she had strewn the remains of millions of corpses across her home with little thought to their dignity, and she’d retched and heaved at the accidental disrespect of it all, even as she’d carefully removed them from the metalwork and returned them safely to the world outside; returned them to the universe they had isolated themselves from and allowed them to drift into atoms.

Family. Friends. Time Lords. Time Tots.

All of them gone. Gone in… what? An hour? An afternoon? A day? She prays it hadn’t been any longer; prays that the Master would not have drawn out their suffering. Prays that however they met their ends, it was not in the fire that had ravaged the planet; she thinks of her own children and how they had screamed for her at the end, and her ears are suddenly full of the countless screams of a million unnamed children, all of them begging her to save them. All of them pleading with her to show mercy; all of them instead slipping into oblivion as the flames had consumed their homes.

A tear drips onto her trousers, then another, then another.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, half to herself and half to their memory, fiddling with the dials of the scanner with her free hand, as though her remorse might yield different results. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”

There’s nothing but static from her left, and nothing but destruction to her right. The perpetrator is gone, and with him all hope for justice or redemption. He’d destroyed everything they’d once held dear, and why? To win her attention? To gain his revenge? He’d muttered words about the Timeless Child; a memory she could only half hold onto, as though trying to grasp at smoke.

All of this, in the name of a child. Genocide. Destruction. Chaos. All of it done with the justification of the liberation of a child she could scarcely remember, woven into their lore and yet ineffably vague. The Master had murdered millions and burnt it all to the ground, and for what? Vindication for his own destroyed childhood? She couldn’t quite blame him for his fury, white-hot and painful to even so much as look at, but to inflict it on others… she remembers, still, his own family, and wonders how he could have stood to kill the infants of others in the same way that his children had been taken from him. Could one murder justify another? Could any? Would there ever be anything that would legitimise, in her eyes, what he had done, and would she ever understand his motivations? She could try; in between her moments of rage and fury and loathing and yearning, she could try; she could place herself in his shoes and attempt to understand it all. And yet she never would; she had never been fashioned into a weapon or a saviour; she had never committed atrocities for the sake of attracting another’s attention; she had never wanted the power and adoration that he had craved. She can attempt to understand him, but she never will.

It seems fruitless to even attempt to understand, and so she needs to find him and interrogate him in a bid to comprehend what he has done, yet with each day and each visit that the scanner finds nothing, she feels her anger and her pain growing. She had thrown the first two devices; they sit a short distance away, twisted and half-molten in the warmth that still radiates from the rocks. She’d lost her temper at their inability to provide results; her new one has a jagged crack down the screen, as she’d threatened it with a similar fate, and yet still it merely clicks and hums, scanning, scanning, scanning, for any trace of an errant Time Lord.

Still it merely provides her with nothing but frustration and empty, hollow optimism.

More tears trickle down her cheeks, and she casts a final look at the Citadel, smoking faintly in the low light of sunset.

Her friends are waiting for her, if only she can evade the ghosts of the past for long enough to lose herself in the present.


End file.
